The New Woman Movement and the Loosening Corset
Poet involved
What happened
The 'New Woman' — a cultural figure who emerged prominently in Britain and America during the 1890s — challenged conventional femininity by pursuing higher education, professional work, political activism, and, crucially, reform dress. In London, New York, and other major cities, New Women adopted looser corsets or dispensed with them entirely, riding bicycles in rational dress and asserting their right to physical mobility. The phenomenon was vigorously debated in newspapers, satirised in Punch, and explored in novels and poetry published throughout the decade.
Literary impact
The New Woman produced an extraordinary generation of women poets, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Nesbit, and Alice Meynell, who wrote directly about bodily and creative freedom. George Egerton's short stories and Sarah Grand's novels articulated the New Woman's rebellion in prose that influenced feminist verse. The movement's explicit connection between the unlaced corset and the free mind became a recurring image in suffragist poetry of the early twentieth century.
Source: Wikipedia
